An Unholy Exodus
I wonder if they still would have bothered to search for his decapitated head had Orpheus not been fair-skinned and romantic with his lyre, or if his birth was that of a fertile land across the Dead and Mediterranean Sea.
People in conversation with me know that to shed my tears takes a fiddling Nero and his burning city, or a zipped leather acting mute with its ragged teeth.
With all these tales bestowed upon humanity, a portrait of dissimilarity takes its frame on the walls of the mundane. One day, people will brush me through the sewn carved wood, and my gaze is to serve as a mere haunting of the metaphysical.
That is the ministration of the ticking clock above my nonage vignette, staged like a lighthouse and its instinctive need to forewarn the soaring ships of the modern trojan horse. Yet, this passage of time crawls with ripened limbs, and since when can adulthood writhe across the ground better than an infant?
The newborn is the closest to the crude gates of sin, the direct reincarnation of the mortal penalty, and thus to the serpentine slithering. And the fleshed-out body has traded the soil for air, and pupillage for potentate.
The clock is an incendiary wing, as a harp is, for I have always viewed that celestial apparatus as an angelic iconoclast. The blurring music of those weaving fingers do not enshroud the gutted strings. Perhaps, the sound reaches me as quietly melancholic because it beholds obsequies of the fallen animals.
The harp is one-winged because flight is a reminder of their thralldom to the wood. The angel is stripped from their saintly choir because their wings are encompassed by their prolonged servitude.
Time is immured within a rectangular frame to both assert and dismiss the theory of its passage and subsequently, our ages. The portrait is the soul guarded by the reaper Azrael, with his grin mistaken for a fatherly smile.
Gaza, to me, has always looked like a child turned into a mother. The way all mothers act- grieving whilst holding a baby’s confection. And I have felt feelings of protection towards this besieged city even though she is older than me, and much tougher than I will ever be.
I am wounded by how her gauze has wrapped my puerile and precarious scars, whilst I cannot tailor her nature a new gown for the next spring. How do I pause surrendering to the identification of being a vilomah when I have always wished to remain childless?
There is this peculiarity relating to looking back and the abstinence from looking. The clouds of woe rained upon Orpheus when he entombed his lover the moment he looked back at her, and as Nero’s Rome creeped to hell’s first stages, his cithara turned into savior orisons with the simple knowledge of paradise.
The likes of me who look back at Palestine and the Gazan martyrs are followed, like a man with an axe on a solitary night, by the dread of this entombment. The entombment of the underground alongside the martyrs, unlike the asset of the Greek myth. We stand nude before this border, the neighborhood is serrated by a wired checkpoint, with no resurrecting hands of our ancestral redeemer.
And then comes the unlike of me, the Christ Antichrist, to my Antichrist Christ. They could picnic across the dead bodies, with perhaps a crystalline waterfall separating, and their wine, mimicking blood and the musical instrument, would still spill down their throats, nonetheless.
My cries were never heard unless they were met by the marching of the Palestinian anthem, or my camp’s martyrs hung on the wall after they had left their house and held a Kalashnikov. My portrait now hears me every night, that little girl with her wand, and the deception of magic.
I have mastered, as a mistress, untangling the violin by becoming the bow that emits the sound and seizes its audience. These instruments, like a spinning top, are the ploy of the corsair, sailing the sea that has bent their lighthouses and declared them their enemies.
Who needs the heavenly throne more than the martyred and their house of wood? And the harp, like all art, feeds on the human condition to engender divinity. To feel closest to God, one must sacrifice and bleed. Have you seen the hands of a harper?
My psyche loathes myths, for the whole world looks like one. And my usage comes from the intent to decry the divorced versions, with Orpheus’ own death being inconclusive, and Nero’s false complicity to the fire when he was in travel.
Would Orpheus look back at Gaza like he did with Eurydice? And would Nero fiddle as our enemies perish, or would we be set ablaze?
One must remember that when the world bears distinct narrations, my mirror reflects one chronicle within. This is their fear, one I have never been burdened with.
